He offers a fresh vision for the twenty-first century that draws on the pioneering works of earlier writers like Thomas Paine and Henry George, who also defied the ideological boxes that today we call “left” and “right.”
At a time when inequality has metastasized – when twenty-five men in the world own more wealth than the bottom 4.5 billion – it is crucial that we create a more level playing field for all. Universal property is one way to move in this direction.
At a time when climate destabilization poses grave risks to millions of people here and now, and even graver risks to future generations, it is crucial to curtail the amount of fossil carbon we dump into the air, while at the same time protecting the real incomes of working families from increases in the prices of energy. Treating the limited capacity of the biosphere to absorb emissions as universal property is one way to do this.
At a time when many nations are sharply polarized along lines of race, ethnicity, class, and conflicting partisan loyalties, it is crucial to find shared interests and values that can help to unite us. Universal property is one way to build this common ground.
Offering a bold path to a more equitable, sustainable, and sane society, Ours will appeal to a readership as wide and diverse as the ownership of universal property itself.
Author’s Note
Keep your eyes on the stars but your feet on the ground.
Theodore Roosevelt
Over the decades I’ve studied our economy from inside and out. As a journalist, I often wrote about it from the outside. Later, I co-founded businesses that probed the limits of capitalism from within. One was a worker-owned cooperative that installed solar heating systems in the 1970s. Another was a socially screened money-market fund called Working Assets, and a third was a progressive phone company called Credo Mobile.
In all these ventures, profit was a goal but not my primary one. My primary goal was to see whether, and by how much, businesses could shift, in a positive way, the behavior of our larger economy. Could they model good corporate behaviour that would then be emulated? Could they challenge the dominant algorithm of corporations, maximize return to shareholders? Could they non-trivially alter the flow of money through our economy?
Sadly, after twenty years, my conclusion was that, while socially minded companies can do good things, they can’t change our economy by much; they are swimming against a tide that is too strong. What we need is not a few companies voluntarily behaving slightly better, but a system that makes all companies behave a lot better, whether intentionally or not. But how, very practically, could such a system be designed and installed?
More broadly, the need to repair or replace capitalism is now indisputable. This is not just because of the financial meltdown of 2008 or the Covid collapse of 2020. It is first and foremost because of markets’ built-in systemic flaws – ever-widening inequality and disruption of nature. Those trajectories cannot continue. They must be turned in their opposite directions – toward greater equality and alignment with nature. But again, the practical question is how.
Ruminating on these questions, I came to the realization that something important is missing from markets. Modern humans are heirs to a vast trove of naturally and socially created wealth. This wealth legitimately belongs to all of us together and equally. It also comes with a duty to be preserved, if not enhanced, for future generations. The problem – and it’s a huge one – is that this co-inherited cornucopia is simultaneously ignored, stolen, and destroyed by markets as structured today.
This is more than an intellectual failure; it is a real-world failure with vast social and planetary consequences. But the point of this book is that it can be fixed. If, through property rights, we recognize co-inherited wealth as assets to be preserved and beneficially owned by all persons equally, we could transform markets, societies, and our planet simultaneously. Instead of destroying nature, markets would protect it; instead of widening inequality, markets would reduce it. Yes, markets would do those things. And that would change everything.
With this realization in mind, I began putting together a mental model of an economy that retains the dynamism and efficiency of markets, but adds a new kind of property rights for large chunks of our co-inherited wealth. In this model, we would each inherit equal non-transferable shares of that co-inherited wealth and surrender them when we die. We would also co-inherit a legal obligation, administered by trustees, to preserve our joint inheritances for future generations. What I came to see was that this kind of property regime could, at scale, make markets work for everyone, including nature and future generations.
Let me make four quick points before you read on. First, the book will invite you to think differently about our economy than you probably have before. So be willing to take off your old economic glasses and put on a new pair.
Second, I’ve written the book for informed general readers, not experts. For that reason, I often skimp on details in order to keep the main argument clear. If you want more depth on a particular topic, the endnotes and bibliography can lead you to it.
Third, although the ideas expressed in this book can apply to all modern economies, they are a product of my experience in the United States, and are perhaps more applicable in Anglophone countries than elsewhere.
And finally, though I began writing this book long before the Covid pandemic, the ideas expressed here are even more pertinent now than ever.
Peter Barnes
Point Reyes Station, California
1 What is Universal Property?
Capitalism as we know it has two egregious flaws: it relentlessly widens inequality and destroys nature. Its “invisible hand,” which is supposed to transform individual self-seeking into widely shared well-being, too often doesn’t, and governments can’t keep up with the consequences. For billions of people around the world, the challenge of our era is to repair or replace capitalism before its cumulative harms become irreparable.
Among those who would repair capitalism, policy ideas abound. Typically, they involve more government regulations, taxes, and spending. Few, if any, would fundamentally alter the dynamics of markets themselves. Among those who would replace capitalism, many would nationalize a good deal of private property and expand government’s role in regulating the rest.
This book explores the terrain midway between repairing and replacing capitalism. It envisions a hybrid market economy in which private property and businesses are complemented by universal property and fiduciary trusts, whose beneficiaries are future generations and all living persons equally.
Economists wrangle over monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies but pay little attention to property rights. Their models all assume that property rights remain just as they are forever. But this needn’t and shouldn’t be the case. My premise is that capitalism’s most grievous flaws are, at root, problems of property rights and must be addressed at that level.
Property rights in modern economies are grants by governments of permission to use, lease, sell, or bequeath specific assets – and just as importantly, to exclude others from doing those things. The assets involved can be tangible, like land and machinery, or intangible, like shares of stock or songs.
Taken as a whole, property rights are akin to gravity: they curve economic space-time. Their tugs and repulsions are everywhere, and nothing can avoid them. And, just as water flows inexorably toward the ocean, so money, goods
